Summary

Is your organization looking back on its quality process and saying, "it failed"? Are you concerned that TQM is just another fad, only to be replaced by the next improvement movement? Don't jump ship just yet. Everyone experiences some failure in his or her quality improvement process. Successful organizations are different because they learn from their failures and do it right the second time.

The author takes you sequentially through the activities required to lead a lasting change from vision to final realization. More importantly, he stresses the balance between process improvement and people improvement.

Each brief chapter covers a specific topic in a framework, which leads you directly to the issues that concern your organization. Throughout the book are checklists, tables, questionnaires, and other helpful tools to support your quality implementation. In addition, Merrill supplies examples showing you what went wrong with other organizations and the successful course of corrections they made.

Choice Review

Merrill (president of Strider International, an organizational assessment firm) suggests that successful organizations are those that learn from their mistakes in implementing a quality managerial culture. By examining the ways in which contemporary businesses have failed to achieve their goals, the author provides insight into the methodology of successful organizations. The book emphasizes the behavioral aspects of quality management practices. An excellent organizational style characterizes the 22 chapters; they are brief, easy to read, and filled with questionnaires, checklists, tables, and other supplementary materials that guide the reader through an introspective analysis of management issues. Each chapter concludes with a "Browser's Briefing" that gives a quick summary and useful checklist of activities. Business educators should require their students to read this text. Undergraduate and practitioner collections. S. R. Kahn; University of Cincinnati